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IRVING HOWE
and Stalinism, reiterated his defense of the methods employed by
the early Bolshevik regime, and had little difficulty in demonstrating
that his liberal critics were necessarily quite as committed to the
belief that "the end justifies the means" as they charged he was.
In the less polemical sections of this essay Trotsky struggled with
the problems of the relation between historically-conditioned moral
values, reflecting the interests of social classes and therefore in con–
stant flux, and those moral "absolutes" he was inclined to depreciate
as excessively abstract, but which he nevertheless found it impos–
sible to avoid using himself.
In the last year or two of his life Trotsky plunged into a dis–
cussion concerning the political role and sociological nature of
Stalinist Russia, which had been provoked by some of his American
followers who found increasingly unsatisfactory his view that Rus–
sia merited "critical support" in the war because it remained a
"degenerated workers' state." Trotsky clung hard to this position.
When the Russian armies marched into Finland, he denounced the
invasion as another instance of Stalinist reaction, yet because he saw
the Russo-Finnish war as part of a larger conflict between the
bourgeois West and the Soviet Union, he continued in his writings
to give the latter "critical support."
This discussion might seem, at first glance, another of those
exercises in ideological hair-splitting which occupy radical sects; but
it had a genuine value, since the issues that were being discussed
would have to be faced by anyone trying to provide a theoretical
framework for the study of Stalinism. Trotsky held that Stalinist
Russia should still be designated as a "degenerated workers' state"
because it preserved the nationalized property forms that were a
"conquest" of the Russian revolution; in his view it was a society
without an independent historical perspective, one that would soon
have to give way either to capitalist restoration or workers' de–
mocracy. His critics insisted that the loss of political power by the
Russian working class meant that it no longer ruled in any social
sense, for as a propertyless class it could rule only through political
means and not in those indirect ways that the bourgeoisie had em–
ployed in its youthful phase. Stalinism, they continued, showed no
signs of producing from within itself a bourgeois restoration; quite
the contrary, for the bureaucracy had become a new ruling class,
